From Dollars to Ringgits

NOTE: The views above are out of our hotel room window.

My son decided that I’d enjoy the adventure of taking a 5 hour bus ride from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He was right. It wasn’t your ordinary Greyhound. We checked in at the Transtar Bus Terminal in Singapore (Hock Seng Building) at 4pm and were shown to the First Class Lounge for first class and premium class passengers. First Class was fully booked so we were accommodated on a premium class bus.

The bus was equipped with curtains to keep out the sun, a berth for the drivers (2) and the bus attendant (1), and had a television at each seat. Darin’s ticket assigned him to seat 24 on a 23 seat bus. Go figure?!

Similar to a flight attendant, the bus attendant was available to answer questions, distribute head phones, hand out the pre-boxed hot meal early in the trip, offer coffee and tea later in the trip and count heads at the two bathroom breaks, customs and immigration stops along the route.

The passengers consisted of Malaysian, Indian, Chinese, Iranian and three other westerners aside from us. An American teacher, her mother and 2 year old daughter were traveling back to their home in Kuala Lumpur after a short visit to Singapore. The teacher offered helpful hints at the customs, immigration and bathroom stops.

Customs and immigrations were routine and without delay for most of the passengers, except for the 3 Iranian women on the bus. At both customs and immigrations, we had a lengthy delay as we waited for them to clear customs and immigration. We did not find out the cause of their delay since our communication consisted of smiles and head nodding – unfortunately we did not share a common spoken language.

It became clearer and clearer to me that we were entering a Muslim country. Many women – although not all – were in traditional dress with their heads covered and long colorful dresses. The highway was modern and could have been the New Jersey Turnpike although there was little English on the signage. Hong Kong and Singapore use English as their common language. It was becoming increasingly clear that would not be the case here.

Of course, the large groves of palm trees on each side of the road were a dead giveaway it wasn’t NJ or NY. And the majority of the drivers (driver on the right hand side, driving on the left) were men. I wondered what the modern and cosmopolitan KL would be like for an American woman? Would this be too much of an adventure?

We’d been warned that the taxi drivers at the KL bus terminal would request twice the fare to take us to our hotel and they didn’t disappoint. Once an agreed upon price of 15 MYR was accepted we were promptly dropped at the Westin Hotel.

If Hong Kong was the appetizer, and Singapore the main course, Kuala Lumpur is a dessert that has the wow factor. This is certainly true of The Westin which is the most luxurious of the hotels on our trip. Given the exchange rate and the cultural differences in this most cosmopolitan of Southeast Asian countries (the writing on the paper money is in Arabic), this is one heck of an ending to an outstanding trip.

Hong Kong dollars (7.5 HKD = 1.00 USD) to Singapore dollars (1.3 SD = 1.00 USD) to Malaysian Ringgits (50.00 MYR=14.3604 USD).